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A Note from the Translator: After my verbal tussle of last week with a semi-literate, moronic Putlerite troll who suggested that a) I kill myself by bashing my head against a wall, b) that KGB rules so I’d better watch out, and c) that some ammonium up the nose might help me think, I was struck by the clarity of the evidence of the sheer barbarity and lack of humanity (and human intelligence) of so many in Russia. The reason why I translate things for LR is that I assume its readership is mainly Western and I worry that the West, and in particular its dreadful multiculturalist and politically correct politicians and public, appeasement artists and moral relativists to the bone, do not have the faintest idea about the reality of the monsters dwelling east of the Pripet Marshes. I see LR as a great corrective for these people, highlighting the truth that so many in the West would prefer not to have to acknowledge. Here then, for those who would cozy up to the bear, is an everyday story of…

Magomedshakir Magomedov lived an open book of a life, like many villagers in Dagestan. Thirty-five years old, he quarried a bit of stone and grazed sheep. He did what he could to earn a living. He believed in God and did not hide his beliefs. He was an open book, a family man with a wife and children.

Last Friday, a colonel in the Russian Ministry of Defense’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, an individual that the Kremlin refuses to name, was arrested in a sweep of 13 Russian white slavers and accused of having “trafficked more than 130 women from Russia and former Soviet republics to work as prostitutes from 1999 to 2007.”

RIA Novosti reported that “the crime syndicate sold women from Russia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus into sex slavery in several European and Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, Italy, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and United Arab Emirates.”

If you had asked Vladimir “KGB can do no wrong” Putin about the possibility of such an event occurring on Thursday, he would have boldly declared it unthinkable. That’s what he said when rumors started to circulate that the KGB had blown up two apartment buildings in Moscow, killing hundreds, in order to blame the Chechens and justify an invasion. And now that it has occurred, he will do nothing to reign in the unbridled power of the secret police he has unleashed upon the nation — nor will the lemming-like citizens of his country demand that he do so.

Russia is traveling right back down the same well-trodden path that led the the obliteration and erasure of the USSR.

That was the response of “Cosmonaut” Padalka describing the Russian-made alternative after being informed that he wouldn’t be able to use the flashy American toilet on the international space station, but would be relegated instead to the Russian one, and wouldn’t be able to use any exercise machine at all since, while the Americans have a cool one, the Russian section doesn’t have any at all.

At least Padalka has a toilet of some kind. Huge swaths of Russia’s population, to this day, rely on the outhouse. They have their hot water cut off by the state in the summer, and sometimes go without running water of any kind. These are just two of the many reasons that Russia doesn’t rank in the top 100 countries of the world for male adult lifespan, and why it loses up to 1 million people from its population every year.

One may well ask, then, where all the billions of oil revenue windfalls that Russia received over the past several years have gone. There is only one answer, of course: The Kremlin has flushed them down the toilet of a paranoid, aggressive, neo-Soviet new cold war with the United States.

Time magazine reports on how Russians are showing their profound respect for Vladimir Putin’s cold -war policies and their abiding love for Russia:

According to his paperwork, “Dmitri” spent several weeks in a psychiatric institution in the Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia and, soon after, he was finally diagnosed with a mild mental illness. He won’t say what the diagnosis actually is; the important thing for him is that the general finding is stamped across his identification papers. It prevents him from ever getting a job in the Russian government. But more importantly for Dmitri, that medical certification prevents him from being drafted into the army.

Dmitri (not his real name) paid $2,500 to be certified with his mental illness three years ago. He is just one of thousands of young Russians who have gotten out of military service (or are trying to) as the country comes up to the April 1 beginning of its biggest peacetime draft in history, one that hopes to enlist 305,000 new soldiers. (See pictures of Russia’s evocation of Soviet military glory.)

Russia considers itself a nation of patriots, but when it comes to defending the motherland, men over the age of 18 aren’t quite ready to lay it on the line.

The spy was only 20, a soft-spoken college student with a pouty smile and a double life. She had 40 agents working for her and dossiers piling up on her home computer. She revved up recruits with talk of an enemy bent on government overthrow. Anna Bukovskaya’s band of young spies stalked about western Russia like Cold War operatives, infiltrating the enemy, jotting down names and numbers, and at times using hidden cameras to secretly film targets.The fruits of her network’s espionage were eventually relayed to the Russian government, Bukovskaya says. And the enemy? They were young Russians just like Bukovskaya, though young Russians belonging to youth groupscritical of the Kremlin and Russian authorities.

It all was very seamy, Bukovskaya says, and ultimately too much for her conscience to bear.

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